Mystery Of Deaths Unsolved 35-year-old Murder Case Still Open, Still A Mystery

March 06, 1988|by BOB WITTMAN JR., The Morning Call

After 35 years, the deaths of Gail and Paul Schultz remain a mystery.

After all that time, no one can explain better than anyone could on March 7, 1953, when their bodies were found, why someone would want to beat the life out of a pretty 18-year-old girl and the 12-year-old mentally handicapped brother she had been taking for a walk that day.

There's still a file of 450 pages on the case at the state police barracks along Airport Road in Hanover Township. It contains a box of rumpled photographs and information gleaned from the hundreds of interviews that investigators have conducted through the years.

But even after all that work, no one can explain who did it, or why, or how, even though the slayings took place in the middle of a pretty Saturday afternoon, within sight of dozens of homes and less than 500 feet from their parents' kitchen window at 28 Mitchell Ave., just outside the borough of Nazareth.

It remains an open case. In fact, every couple of years, someone comes forward with a tip or an idea. Each is investigated to the fullest extent possible.

"There isn't anyone who would prefer to resolve this case more than the Pennsylvania State Police," says Capt. Robert G. Werts, Troop M commander.

But Werts isn't optimistic. He might agree, in fact, with his predecessor of three decades ago, Capt. Charles S. Cook. Cook,who headed the initial investigation of the Schultz murders, said of Gail and Paul at a coroner's inquest three days after the bodies were found: "It was just as though they closed the door and stepped out of the world."

It will be exactly 35 years ago tomorrow since the two finished a lunch of scrambled eggs, donned rubber boots and headed off along Black Rock Creek for a walk from which they would never return. The stream ran behind the neat neighborhood of matching Cape Cod houses in a subdivision called East Lawn Gardens.

They left the house around 2 p.m. and walked to a friend's nearby. But when their friend could not come out, they went to the creek by themselves. Several people would later recall having seen the brother and sister there. Then, they were found dead.

Gail was a homebody. She seldom dated. She didn't have a job. Since her graduation the previous June from Nazareth High School, she had been devoting her days to the care of her brother, Paul.

Gail's father, Paul Sr., had been married once before - to Gail's mother. But she died when Gail was small, and Gail was raised by her stepmother, Claire Burke. The couple had had a child of their own, Paul Jr., Gail's half- brother.

The opportunities for mentally handicapped children were scant in those years, so people like Paul never got a chance to attend school. But after Gail graduated, she took on the task of teaching Paul. That's why she liked to walk with him along the creek to look for rocks.

Indeed, her parents had moved to the subdivision the year before from an older neighborhood in the center of town so Paul would have that kind of open space in which to play.

Around 4:30 that Saturday, Claire Schultz became concerned about Gail and Paul's long absence. The afternoon was waning and the temperature was dropping, and she couldn't understand why they hadn't come in. She asked her husband to go out and call them.

Paul Sr. was a 47-year-old draftsman at Binney & Smith, the crayon manufacturer in Easton. He repaired television sets on the side. In fact, that's what he was doing that afternoon in his basement shop with a helper named Robert Howells when Claire called to him.

Paul Sr. went to the back yard and shouted for Gail and Paul Jr. When he received no answer, he walked out to the creek. That's where he came upon the two, lying face down in 10 inches of water.

"When I found them, my first impression was it was literally an impossible thing - it just couldn't be," Paul Sr. told a newspaper reporter the next day.

Claire had been watching from the kitchen window. She saw her husband bend over. She watched as he extracted the boy from the water. It was the first inkling she had that something was wrong.

Schultz's helper, meanwhile, had gone outside to return tools to his car. He heard the man's cry of discovery from the rear of the property and saw him lift the child out of the water. Seeing the emergency, Howells went to the phone and called the family's doctor, John Fraunfelder. He also called the Nazareth ambulance.

Someone should have called the police, but no one, at that point, realized that they were the victims of anything other than a freak accident. In fact, no one was willing to believe that they were dead. When Dr. Fraunfelder arrived, he found Schultz trying to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The ambulance crew, too, had a hard time believing there was no hope. The volunteers took the victims to the Nazareth Fire Company, where more efforts were made to revive them.